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THE CONTEST IN AMERICA 



By JOHN STUART MILL 



KEPRINTED FROM FRASER'S MAGAZINE 




BOSTON 
LFTTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY 

MDCCCLXII 






RIVERSIDE. CAMBRIDGE: 
TBI N TED BY H. O. HOUGHTON 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 



The cloud which for the space of a month hung" 
gloomily over the civilized world, black with far 
worse evils than those of simple war, has passed 
from over our heads without bursting. The fear 
has not been realized, that the only two first-rate 
Powers who are also free nations would take to 
tearing each other in pieces, both the one and the 
other in a bad and odious cause. For while, on the 
American side, the war would have been one of reck- 
less persistency in wrong, on ours it would have 
been a war in alliance with, and, to practical pur- 
poses, in defence and propagation of, slavery. We 
had, indeed, been Avronged. We had suffered an 
indignity, and something more than an indignity, 
which, not to have resented, would have been to in- 
vite a constant succession of insults and injuries from 
the same and from every other quarter. We could 
have acted no otherwise than we have done: yet it is 
impossible to think, without something like a shudder, 
from what we have escaped. We, the emancipators 
of the slave — who have wearied every Court and 
Government in Europe and America with our pro- 



4 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

te^ts and remonstrances, until we goaded them into 
at least ostensibly cooperating with us to prevent 
the enslaving of the negro — we, who for the last 
half century have spent annual sums, equal to the 
revenue of a small kingdom, in blockading the Afri- 
can coast, for a cause in which we not only had no 
interest, but which was contrary to our pecuniary 
interest, and which many believed would ruin, as 
many among us still, though erroneously, believe 
that it has ruined, our colonies, — ive should have 
lent a hand to setting up, in one of the most com- 
manding positions of the world, a powerful repub- 
lic, devoted not only to slavery, but to pro-slavery 
propagandism — should have helped to give a place 
in the community of nations to a conspiracy of 
slave-owners, who have broken their connection with 
the American Federation on the sole ground, osten- 
tatiously proclaimed, that they thought an attempt 
would be made to restrain, not slavery itself, but 
their purpose of spreading slavery wherever migra- 
tion or force could carry it. 

A nation which has made the professions that 
England has, does not with impunity, under how- 
ever great provocation, betake itself to frustratino- 
the objects for which it has been calling on the rest 
of the world to make sacrifices of what they think 
their interest. At present all the nations of Europe 
have sympathized with us ; have acknowledo-ed that 
we were injured, and declared with rare unanimity, 
that we had no choice but to resist, if necessary by 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 5 

arms. But the consequences of such a war would 
soon have buried its causes in oblivion. When the 
new Confederate States, made an independent Power 
by English help, had begun their crusade to carry 
negro slavery from the Potomac to Cape Horn ; 
who would then have remembered that England 
raised up this scourge to humanity not for the evil's 
sake, but because somebody had offered an insult to 
her flag? Or even if unforgotten, who w^ould then 
have felt that such a grievance was a sufficient pal- 
liation of the crime ? Every reader of a newspaper, 
to the farthest ends of the earth, would have believed 
and remembered one thing only — that at the criti- 
cal juncture w4iich was to decide whether slavery 
should blaze up afresh with increased vigor or be 
trodden out — at the moment of conflict between 
the good and the evil spirit — at the dawn of a 
hope that the demon might now at last be chained 
and flung into the pit, England stepped in, and, for 
the sake of cotton, made Satan victorious. 

The world has been saved from this calamity, and 
England from this disgrace. The accusation would 
indeed have been a calumny. But to be able to 
defy calumny, a nation, like an individual, must 
stand very clear of just reproach in its previous 
conduct. Unfortunately, we ourselves have given 
too much plausibility to the charge. Not by any- 
thing said or done by us as a Government or as a 
nation, but by the tone of our press, and in some 
degree, it must be owned, the general opinion of 



5 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

English society. It is too true, that the feelings 
which have been manifested since the beginning of 
the American contest — the judgments which have 
been put forth, and the wishes which have been ex- 
pressed concerning the incidents and probable event- 
ualities of the struggle — the bitter and irritating 
criticism which has been kept up, not even against 
both parties equally, but almost solely against the 
party in the right, and the ungenerous refusal of all 
those just allowances which no country needs more 
than our own, whenever its circumstances are as 
near to those of America as a cut finger is to an 
almost mortal w^ound, — these facts, with minds not 
favorably disposed to us, would have gone far to 
make the most odious interpretation of the war in 
which we have been so nearly engaged with the 
United States, appear by many degrees the most 
probable. There is no denying that our attitude 
towards the contending parties (I mean our moral 
attitude, for politically there was no other course 
open to us than neutrality) has not been that which 
becomes a people who are as sincere enemies of 
slavery as the English really are, and have made as 
great sacrifices to put an end to it where they could. 
And it has been an additional misfortune that some 
of our most powerful journals have been for many 
years past very unfavorable exponents of English 
feeling on all subjects connected with slavery: some, 
probably, from the influences, more or less direct, 
of West Indian opinions and interests : others from 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. ^ 

inbred Toryism, which, even when compelled by 
reason to hold opinions favorable to liberty, is al- 
ways adverse to it in feeling" ; which likes the spec- 
tacle of irresponsible power exercised by one person 
over others ; wdiich has no moral repugnance to the 
thought of human beings born to the penal servi- 
tude for life, to which for the term of a few years 
we sentence our most hardened criminals, but keeps 
its indignation to be expended on " rabid and fanat- 
ical abolitionists " across the Atlantic, and on those 
writers in Eiigland who attach a sufficiently serious 
meaning to their Christian professions, to consider a 
fight against slavery as a fight for God. 

Now, when the mind of England, and it may 
almost be said, of the civilized part of mankind, has 
been relieved from the incubus which had weighed 
on it ever since the Trent outrage, and when we are 
no longer feeling towards the Northern Americans 
as men feel towards those with whom they may be 
on the point of struggling for life or death ; now, if 
ever, is the time to review our position, and consider 
wdiether we have been feeling" what ouo^ht to have 
been felt, and wishing what ought to have been 
wished, regarding the contest in which the Northern 
States are engaged with the South. 

In considering this matter, we ought to dismiss 
from our minds, as far as possible, those feelings 
against the North, which have been engendered not 
merely by the Trent aggression, but by the previous 
anti-British effusions of newspaper writers and stump 



g THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

orators. It is hardly worth while to ask how far 
these explosions of ill-humor are anything* more 
than might have been anticipated from ill-disciplined 
minds, disappointed of the sympathy which they just- 
ly thought they had a right to expect from the great 
anti-slavery people, in their really noble enterprise. 
It is almost superfluous to remark that a democratic 
Government always shows worst where other Gov- 
ernments generally show best, on its outside ; that 
unreasonable people are much more noisy than the 
reasonable ; that the froth and scum are the part of 
a violently fermenting liquid that meets the eyes, but 
are not its body and substance. Without insisting 
on these things, I contend, that all previous cause 
of offence should be considered as cancelled, by the 
reparation w^hich the American Government has so 
amply made ; not so much the reparation itself, 
which might have been so made as to leave still 
greater cause of permanent resentment behind it ; 
but the manner and spirit in which they have made 
it. These have been such as most of us, I venture 
to say, did not by any means expect. If reparation 
were made at all, of which few of us felt more than 
a hope, we thought that it would have been made 
obviously as a concession to prudence, not to princi- 
ple. We thought that there would have been truck- 
ling to the newspaper editors and supposed fire-eaters 
who were crying out for retaining the prisoners at 
all hazards. We expected that the atonement, if 
atonement there were, would have been made with 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 9 

reservations, perhaps under protest. We expected 
that the correspondence woukl have been spun out, 
and a trial made to induce Eng^land to be satisfied 
with less ; or that there would have been a proposal 
of arbitration ; or that England would have been 
asked to make concessions in return for justice ; or 
that if submission was made, it would have been 
made, ostensibly, to the opinions and wishes of Con- 
tinental Europe. We expected anything, in short, 
which would have been weak and timid and paltry. 
The only thing which no one seemed to expect, is 
what has actually happened. Mr. Lincoln's Gov- 
ernment have done none of these things. Like 
honest men, they have said in direct terms, that our 
demand was right ; that they yielded to it because it 
was just ; that if they themselves had received the 
same treatment, they would have demanded the same 
reparation ; and that if what seemed to be the Ameri- 
can side of a question was not the just side, they 
would be on the side of justice ; happy as they were 
to find after their resolution had been taken, that it 
was also the side which America had formerly de- 
fended. Is there any one, capable of a moral judg- 
ment or feeling, who will say that his opinion of 
America and American statesmen, is not raised by 
such an act, done on such grounds ] The act itself 
may have been imposed by the necessity of the cir- 
cumstances ; but the reasons given, the principles of 
action professed, were their own choice. Putting 
the worst hypothesis possible, which it would be the 



IQ THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

height of injustice to entertain seriously, that the con- 
cession was really made solely to convenience, and 
that the profession of regard for justice was hypoc- 
risy, even so, the ground taken, even if insincerely, 
is the most hopeful sign of the moral state of the 
American mind which has appeared for many years. 
That a sense of justice should he the motive which 
the rulers of a country rely on, to reconcile the pub- 
lic to an unpopular, and what might seem a humili- 
ating act ; that the journalists, the orators, many 
lawyers, the Lower House of Congress, and Mr. 
Lincoln's own naval secretary, should be told in the 
face of the world, by their own Government, that 
they have been giving public thanks, presents of 
swords, freedom of cities, all manner of heroic hon- 
ors to the author of an act which, though not so in- 
tended, was lawless and wrong, and for which the 
proper remedy is confession and atonement ; that 
this should be the accepted policy (supposing it to 
be nothing higher) of a Democratic Republic, shows 
even unlimited democracy to be a better thing than 
many Englishmen have lately been in the habit of 
considering it, and goes some way towards proving 
that the aberrations even of a ruling multitude are 
only fatal when the better instructed have not the 
virtue or the courage to front them boldly. Nor 
ought it to be forgotten, to the honor of Mr. Lin- 
coln's Government, that in doing what was in itself 
right, they have done also what was best fitted to 
allay the animosity which was daily becoming more 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. J X 

bitter between the two nations so long as the question 
remained open. They have put the brand of con- 
fessed injustice upon that rankling- and vindictive 
resentment with which the profligate and passionate 
part of the American press has been threatening us 
in the event of concession, and which is to be mani- 
fested by some dire revenge, to be taken, as they 
pretend, after the nation is extricated from its pres- 
ent difficulties. Mr. Lincoln has done what depend- 
ed on him to make this spirit expire with the occa- 
sion which raised it up ; and we shall have ourselves 
chiefly to blame if we keep it alive by the further 
prolongation of that stream of vituperative elo- 
quence, the source of which, even now, when the 
cause of quarrel has been amicably made up, does 
not seem to have run dry.^ 

Let us, then, without reference to these jars, or 
to the declamations of newspaper writers on either 
side of the Atlantic, examine the American question 

1 I do not forget one regrettable passage in Mr. Seward's letter, 
in which he said that " if the safety of the Union required the de- 
tention of the captured persons, it would be the right and duty of 
this Government to detain them." I sincerely grieve to find this 
sentence in the dispatch, for the exceptions to the general rules of 
morality are not a subject to be lightly or unnecessarily tampered 
with. The doctrine in itself is no other than that professed and 
acted on by all governments — that self-preservation, in a State, 
as in an individual, is a warrant for many things which at all other 
times ought to be rigidly abstained from. At all events, no nation 
which has ever passed " laws of exception," which ever supended 
the Habeas Corpus Act or passed an Alien Bill in dread of a Char- 
tist insurrection, has a right to throw the first stone at Mr. Lincoln's 
Government. 



12 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

as it stood from the beginning ; its origin, the pur- 
pose of both the combatants, and its various possi- 
ble or probable issues. 

There is a theory in England, believed perhaps 
by some, half believed by many more, which is only 
consistent with original ignorance, or complete sub- 
sequent forgetfulness, of all the antecedents of the 
contest. There are people who tell us that, on the 
side of the North, the question is not one of slavery 
at all. The North, it seems, have no more objec- 
tion to slavery than the South have. Their leaders 
never say one word implying disapprobation of it. 
They are ready, on the contrary, to give it new 
guarantees ; to renounce all that they have been 
contending for ; to win back, if opportunity offers, 
the South to the Union by surrendering the whole 
point. 

If this be the true state of the case, what are 
the Southern chiefs fighting about I Their apolo- 
gists in England say that it is about tariffs, and 
similar trumpery. T/ie^ say nothing of the kind. 
They tell the world, and they told their own citi- 
zens when they wanted their votes, that the object 
of the fight was slavery. Many years ago, when 
General Jackson was President, South Carolina did 
nearly rebel (she never was near separating) about 
a tariff ; but no other State abetted her, and a strong 
adverse demonstration from Virginia brought the 
matter to a close. Yet the tariff of that day was 
rigidly protective. Compared with that, the one in 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 13 

force at the time of the secession was a free-trade 
tariff. This latter was the result of several succes- 
sive modifications in the direction of freedom ; and 
its principle was not protection for protection, but 
as much of it only as might incidentally result 
from duties imposed for revenue. Even the Morrill 
tariff (which never could have been passed but for 
the Southern secession) is stated by the high au- 
thoiity of Mr. H. C. Carey to be considerably more 
liberal than the reformed French tariff under Mr. 
Cobden's treaty ; insomuch that he, a Protectionist, 
would be glad to exchange his own protective tariff 
for Louis Napoleon's free-trade one. But why dis- 
cuss, on probable evidence, notorious facts ^ The 
world knows what the question between the North 
and South has been for many years, and still is. 
Slavery alone was thought of, alone talked of. Sla- 
very was battled for and against, on the floor of 
Congress and in the plains of Kansas ; on the sla- 
very question exclusively was the party constituted 
which now rules the United States : on slavery Fre- 
mont was rejected, on slavery Lincoln was elected ; 
the South separated on slavery, and proclaimed sla- 
very as the one cause of separation. 

It is true enough that the North are not carrying 
on war to abolish slavery in the States where it legal- 
ly exists. Could it have been expected, or even per- 
haps desired, that they should ] A great party does 
not change suddenly, and at once, all its principles 
and professions. The Republican party have taken 



I4f THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

their stand on law, and the existing constitution of 
the Union. They have disclaimed all right to at- 
tempt anything which that constitution forbids. It 
does forbid interference by the Federal Congress 
with slavery in the Slave States ; but it does not 
forbid their abolishing it in the District of Colum- 
bia ; and this they are now doing, having voted, I 
perceive, in their present pecuniary straits, a million 
of dollars to indemnify the slave-owners of the 
District. Neither did the Constitution, in their own 
opinion, require them to permit the introduction of 
slavery into the territories which were not yet States. 
^To prevent this, the Republican party was formed, 
and to prevent it, they are now fighting, as the 
slave-owners are fighting to enforce it. 

The present government of the United States is 
not an Abolitionist government. Abolitionists, in 
America, mean those who do not keep within the 
constitution ; who demand the destruction (as far 
as slavery is concerned) of as much of it as pro- 
tects the internal legislation of each State from the 
control of Congress; who aim at abolishing slavery 
wherever it exists, by force if need be, but certainly 
by some other power than the constituted authorities 
of the Slave States. The Republican party neither 
aim nor profess to aim at this object. And when 
we consider the flood of wrath which would have 
been poured out against them if they did, by the 
very writers who now taunt them with not doing 
it, we shall be apt to think the taunt a little mis- 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. J 5 

placed. But though not an Abohtionist party, they 
are a Free-soil party. If they have not taken arms 
against slavery, they have against its extension. 
And they know, as we may know if we please, that 
this amounts to the same thing. The day when 
slavery can no longer extend itself, is the day of its 
doom. The slave-owners know this, and it is the 
cause of their fury. They know, as all know who 
have attended to the subject, that confinement within 
existing limits is its death-warrant. Slavery, under 
the conditions in which it exists in the States, ex- 
hausts even the beneficent powers of nature. So 
incompatible is it with any kind whatever of skilled 
labor, that it causes the whole productive resources 
of the country to be concentrated on one or two 
products, cotton being the chief, which require, to 
raise and prepare them for the market, little besides 
brute animal force. The cotton cultivation, in the 
opinion of all competent judges, alone saves North 
American slavery ; but cotton cultivation, exclu- 
sively adhered to, exhausts in a moderate number 
of years all the soils which are fit for it, and can 
only be kept up by travelling farther and farther 
westward. Mr. Olmsted has given a vivid de- 
scription of the desolate state of parts of Georgia 
and the Carolinas, once among the richest specimens 
of soil and cultivation in the world; and even the 
more recently colonized Alabama, as he shows, is 
rapidly following in the same downhill track. To 
slavery, therefore, it is a matter of life and death to 



16 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

find fresh fields for the employment of slave labor. 
Confine it to the present States, and the owners of 
slave property will either be speedily ruined, or will 
have to find means of reforming" and renovating 
their agricultural system; which cannot be done 
without treating the slaves like human beings, nor 
without so large an employment of skilled, that is, 
of free labor, as will widely displace the unskilled, 
and so depreciate the pecuniary value of the slave, 
that the immediate mitigation and ultimate extinction 
of slavery would be a nearly inevitable and probably 
rapid consequence. 

The Republican leaders do not talk to the pub- 
lic of these almost certain results of success in the 
present conflict. They talk but little, in the existing 
emergency, even of the original cause of quarrel. 
The most ordinary policy teaches them to inscribe 
on their banner that part only of their known prin- 
ciples in which their supporters are unanimous. 
The preservation of the Union is an object about 
which the North are agreed ; and it has many ad- 
herents, as they believe, in the South generally. 
That nearly half the population of the Border 
Slave States are in favor of it is a patent fact, 
since they are now fighting in its defence. It is 
not probable that they would be willing to fight 
directly against slavery. The Republicans well 
know that if they can reestablish the Union, they 
gain everything for which they originally contend- 
ed ; and it would be a plain breach of faith with 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. in 

the Southern friends of the Government, if, after 
rallying them round its standard for a purpose of 
which they approve, it were suddenly to alter its 
terms of conjmunion without their consent. 

But the parties in a protracted civil war almost 
invariahly end by taking more extreme, not to say 
higher grounds of principle, than they began with. 
Middle parties and friends of compromise are soon 
left behind ; and if the writers who so severely 
criticize the present moderation of the Free-soilers 
are desirous to see the war become an abolition 
war, it is probable that if the war lasts long enough 
they will be gratified. Without the smallest pre- 
tension to see further into futurity than other peo- 
ple, I at least have foreseen and foretold from the 
tirst, that if the South were not promptly put 
down, the contest would become distinctly an anti- 
slavery one ; nor do I believe that any person, ac- 
customed to reflect on the course of hunian aflairs 
in troubled times, can expect anything else. Those 
who have read, even cursorily, the most valuable 
testimony to which the English public have access, 
concerning the real state of aflairs in America — 
the letters of the Tmes' correspondent, Mr. Rus- 
sell — must have observed how early and rapidly 
he arrived at the same conclusion, and with what 
increasing emphasis he now continually reiterates 
it. In one of his recent letters he names the end 
of next sunmier as the period by which, if the 
2 



|g THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

war has not sooner terminated, it will have assumed 
a complete anti-slavery character. So early a term 
exceeds, I confess, my most sanguine hopes ; but 
if Mr. Russell be right. Heaven forbid that the 
war should cease sooner; for if it lasts till then, it 
is quite possible that it will regenerate the Amer- 
ican people. 

If, however, the purposes of the North may 
be doubted or misunderstood, there is at least no 
question as to those of the South. They make 
no concealment of tJieir principles. As long 
as they were allowed to direct all the policy of 
the Union ; to break through compromise after 
compromise, encroach step after step, until they 
reached the pitch of claiming a right to carry 
slave property into the Free States, and, in op- 
position to the laws of those States, hold it as 
property there ; so long, they were willing to re- 
main in the Union. The moment a President 
was elected of whom it was inferred from his 
opinions, not that he would take any measures 
against slavery where it exists, but that he would 
oppose its establishment where it exists not, — that 
moment they broke loose from what was, at least, 
a very solemn contract, and formed themselves 
into a Confederation professing as its fundamental 
principle not merely the perpetuation, but the in- 
definite extension of slavery. And the doctrine is 
loudly preached through the new Republic, that 



THE COMEST IN AMERICA. ig 

slavery, whether black or white, is a good in itself, 
and the proper condition of the working classes 
everywhere. 

Let me, in a few words, remind the reader what 
sort of a thing this is, which the white oligarchy 
of the South have banded themselves together to 
propagate and establish, if they could, universally. 
When it is wished to describe any portion of the 
human race as in the lowest state of debasement, 
and under the most cruel oppression, in which it 
is possible for human beings to live, they are com- 
pared to slaves. When words are sought by which 
to stigmatize the most odious despotism, exercised 
in the most odious manner, and all other compari- 
sons are found inadequate, the despots are said to 
be like slave-masters, or slave-drivers. What, by 
a rhetorical license, the worst oppressors of the 
human race, by way of stamping on them the 
most hateful character possible, are said to be, 
these men, in very truth, are. I do not mean 
that all of them are hateful personally, any more 
than all the Inquisitors, or all the buccaneers. But 
the position which they occupy, and the abstract 
excellence of which they are in arms to vindicate, 
is that which the united voice of mankind habitu- 
ally selects as the type of all hateful qualities. I 
will not bandy chicanery about the more or less 
of stripes or other torments which are daily requi- 
site to keep the machine in working order, nor 
discuss whether the Legrees or the St. Clairs are 



20 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

more numerous among the slave-owners of the 
Southern States. The broad facts of the case suf- 
fice. One fact is enough. There are, Heaven 
knows, vicious and tyrannical institutions in ample 
abundance on the earth. But this institution is 
the only one of them all which requires, to keep 
it going, that human beings should be burnt alive. 
The calm and dispassionate Mr. Olmsted affirms 
that there has not been a single year, for many 
years past, in which this horror is not known to 
have been perpetrated in some part or other of 
the South. And not upon negroes only ; the Ud- 
inhu7'gh Revieiv^ in a recent number, gave the 
hideous details of the burning alive of an unfor- 
tunate Northern huckster by Lynch law, on mere 
suspicion of having aided in the escape of a slave. 
What must American slavery be, if deeds like 
these are necessary under it ] — and if they are 
not necessary and are yet done, is not the evidence 
against slavery still more damning ] The South 
are in rebellion not for simple slavery ; they are 
in rebellion for the right of burning human crea- 
tures alive. 

But w^e are told, by a strange misapplication of 
a true principle, that the South had a right to 
separate ; that their separation ought to have been 
consented to, the moment they showed themselves 
ready to fight for it ; and that the North, in re- 
sisting it, are committing the same error and 
wrong which England committed in opposing the 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. gj 

original separation of the thirteen colonies. This 
is carrying' the doctrine of the sacred right of in- 
surrection rather far. It is wonderful how easy 
and liberal and complying people can be in other 
people's concerns. Because they are willing to 
surrender their own past, and have no objection to 
join in reprobation of their great-grandfathers, 
they never put themselves the question what they 
themselves would do in circumstances far less try- 
ing, under far less pressure of real national calamity. 
Would those who profess these ardent revolution- 
ary principles consent to their being applied to 
Ireland, or India, or the Ionian Islands ? How 
have they treated those who did attempt so to ap- 
ply them ? But the case can dispense with any 
mere argumentiim ad liominem, I am not fright- 
ened at the word rebellion. I do not scruple to 
say that I have sympathized more or less ardently 
with most of the rebellions, successful and unsuc- 
cessful, which have taken place in my time. But I 
certainly never conceived that there was a sufficient 
title to my sympathy in the mere fact of being a 
rebel ; that the act of taking arms against one's 
fellow-citizens was so meritorious in itself, was so 
completely its own justification, that no question 
need be asked concerning the motive. It seems to 
me a stran^fe doctrine that the most serious and re- 
sponsible of all human acts imposes no obligation 
on those who do it of showing that they have a 
real grievance ; that those who rebel for the power 



22 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

of oppressing others, exercise as sacred a right as 
those who do the same thing to resist oppression 
practised upon themselves. Neither rebellion nor 
any other act which affects the interests of others, 
is sufficiently legitimated by the mere will to do it. 
Secession may be laudable, and so may any other 
kind of insurrection ; but it may also be an enor- 
mous crime. It is the one or the other, according 
to the object and the provocation. And if there 
ever was an object which, by its bare announce- 
ment, stamped rebels against a particular community 
as enemies of mankind, it is the one professed by 
the South. Their right to separate is the right 
which Cartouche or Turpin would have had to se- 
cede from their respective countries, because the 
laws of those countries would not suffer them to 
rob and murder on the highway. The only real 
difference is that the present rebels are more pow- 
erful than Cartouche or Turpin, and may possibly 
be able to effect their iniquitous purpose. 

Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that 
the mere will to separate were in this case, or in 
any case, a sufficient ground for separation, I beg 
to be informed zvhose will ] The will of any knot 
of men who, by fair means or foul, by usurpation, 
terrorism, or fraud, have got the reins of govern- 
ment into their hands ] If the inmates of Park- 
hurst Prison were to get possession of the Isle of 
Wight, occupy its military positions, enlist one part 
of its inhabitants in their own ranks, set the re- 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 28 

maiiuler of them to work in chain gangs, and 
declare themselves independent, ought their recog- 
nition by the British Government to be an immedi- 
ate consequence ] Before admitting the authority 
of any persons, as organs of the will of the people, 
to dispose of the whole political existence of a 
country, I ask to see whether their credentials are 
from the whole, or only from a part. And first, 
it is necessary to ask, Have the slaves been con- 
sulted ] Has their will been counted as any part 
in the estimate of collective volition ? They are a 
part of the population. However natural in the 
country itself, it is rather cool in English writers 
who talk so glibly of the ten millions (I believe 
there are only eight), to pass over the very exis- 
tence of four millions who must abhor the idea of 
separation. Remember, pje consider them to be 
human beings, entitled to human rights. Nor can 
it be doubted that the mere f[ict of belonging to a 
Union in some parts of which slavery is reprobated, 
is some alleviation of their condition, if only as re- 
gards future probabilities. But even of the white 
population, it is questionable if there was in the 
beginning a majority for secession anywhere but in 
South Carolina. Though the thing was pre-deter- 
mined, and most of the States committed by their 
public authorities before the people were called on 
to vote ; though in taking the votes terrorism in 
many places reigned triumphant ; yet even so, in 
several of the States, secession was carried only by 



g4 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

narrow majorities. In some the authorities have 
not dared to pubhsh the numbers ; in some it is 
asserted that no vote has ever been taken. Further 
(as was pointed out in an admirable letter by Mr. 
Carey), the Slave States are intersected in the mid- 
dle, from their northern frontier almost to the Gulf 
of Mexico, by a country of free labor — the moun- 
tain region of the Alleghanies and their depen- 
dencies, forming parts of Virginia, North Carolina, 
Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, in which, from 
the nature of the climate and of the agricultural 
and mining industry, slavery to any material extent 
never did, and never will, exist. This mountain 
zone is peopled by ardent friends of the Union. 
Could the Union abandon them, without even an 
effort, to be dealt with at the pleasure of an exas- 
perated slave-owning oligarchy ] Could it abandon 
the Germans who, in Western Texas, have made 
so meritorious a commencement of growing cotton 
on the borders of the Mexican Gulf by free labor ] 
Were the right of the slave-owners to secede ever 
so clear, they have no right to carry these with 
them ; unless allegiance is a mere question of local 
proximity, and my next neighbor, if I am a strong- 
er man, can be compelled to follow me in any law- 
less vagaries I choose to indulge. 

But (it is said) the North will never succeed in 
conquering the South ; and since the separation 
must in the end be recognized, it is better to do at 
first what must be done at last ; moreover, if it did 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 25 

conquer them, it conlcl not govern them when con- 
quered, consistently with free institutions. With 
no one of these propositions can I agree. 

Whether or not the Northern Americans 2vill 
succeed in reconquering the South, I do not affect 
to foresee. That they can conquer it, if their pre- 
sent determination holds, I have never entertained 
a doubt ; for they are twice as numerous, and ten 
or twelve times as rich. Not by taking military 
possession of their country, or marching an army 
through it, but by wearing them out, exhausting 
their resources, depriving them of the comforts of 
life, encouraging their slaves to desert, and exclud- 
ing them from communication with foreign coun- 
tries. All this, of course, depends on the supposi- 
tion that the North does not give in first. Whether 
they will persevere to this point, or whether their 
spirit, their patience, and the sacrifices they are 
willing to make, will be exhausted before reaching 
it, I cannot tell. They may, in the end, be wearied 
into recognizing the separation. But to those who 
say that because this may have to be done at last, 
it ought to have been done at first, I put the very 
serious question — On what terms ] Have they 
ever considered what would have been the mean- 
ing of separation if it had been assented to by the 
Northern States when first demanded ] People 
talk as if separation meant nothing more than the 
independence of the seceding States. To have ac- 
cepted it under that limitation would have been, on 



2Q THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

the part of the South, to give up that which they 
have seceded expressly to preserve. Separation, 
with them, means at least half the Territories ; in- 
cluding the Mexican border, and the consequent 
power of invading and overrunning Spanish America 
for the purpose of planting there the " peculiar in- 
stitution" which even Mexican civilization has found 
too bad to be endured. There is no knowing to 
what point of degradation a country may be driven 
in a desperate state of its affairs ; but if the North 
ever, unless on the brink of actual ruin, makes 
peace with the South, giving up the original cause 
of quarrel, the freedom of the Territories ; if it re- 
signs to them when out of the Union that power of 
evil which it would not grant to retain them in the 
Union — it will incur the pity and disdain of pos- 
terity. And no one can suppose that the South 
would have consented, or in their present temper 
ever will consent, to an accommodation on any other 
terms. It will require a succession of humiliation 
to bring them to that. The necessity of reconciling 
themselves to the confinement of slavery within its 
existing boundaries, with the natural consequence, 
immediate mitigation of slavery, and ultimate eman- 
cipation, is a lesson which they are in no mood to 
learn from anything but disaster. Two or three 
defeats in the field, breaking their military strength, 
though not followed by an invasion of their terri- 
tory, may possibly teach it to them. If so, there 
is no breach of charity in hoping that this severe 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. (^ 

schooling- may promptly come. When men set 
themselves up, in defiance of the rest of the world, 
to do the devil's work, no good can come of them 
until the world has made them feel that this work 
cannot be suffered to be done any longer. If this 
knowledge does not come to them for several years, 
the abolition question will by that time have settled 
itself. For assuredly Congress will very soon make 
up its mind to declare all slaves free who belong to 
persons in arms against the Union. When that is 
done, slavery, confined to a minority, will soon cure 
itself; and the pecuniary value of the negroes be- 
longing to loyal masters will probably not exceed 
the amount of compensation which the United States 
will be willing and able to give. 

The assumed difficulty of governing the Southern 
States as free and equal commonwealths, in case of 
their return to the Union, is purely imaginary. If 
brought back by force, and not by voluntary com- 
pact, they will return without the Territories, and 
without a Fugitive Slave Law. It may be assumed 
that in that event the victorious party would make 
the alterations in the Federal Constitution which 
are necessary to adapt it to the new circumstances, 
and which would not infringe, but strengthen, its 
democratic principles. An article would have to be 
inserted prohibiting the extension of slavery to the 
Territories, or the admission into the Union of any 
new Slave State. Without any other guarantee, the 
rapid formation of new Free States would ensure 



2S THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

to freedom a decisive and constantly increasing- 
majority in Congress. It would also be right to 
abrogate that bad provision of the Constitution (a 
necessary compromise at the time of its first estab- 
lishment) whereby the slaves, though reckoned as 
citizens in no other respect, are counted, to the ex- 
tent of three fifths of their number, in the estimate 
of the population for fixing the number of repre- 
sentatives of each State in the Lower House of 
Congress. Why should the masters have members 
in right of their human chattels, any more than of 
their oxen and pigs ^ The President, in his Mes- 
sage, has already proposed that this salutary reform 
should be effected in the case of Maryland, addi- 
tional territory, detached from Virginia, being given 
to that State as an equivalent : thus clearly indicat- 
ing the policy which he approves, and which he is 
probably willing to make universal. 

As it is necessary to be prepared for all possibili- 
ties, let us now contemplate another. Let us sup- 
pose the worst possible issue of this war — the one 
apparently desired by those English writers whose 
moral feeling is so philosophically indifferent be- 
tween the apostles of slavery and its enemies. Sup- 
pose that the North should stoop to recognize the 
new Confederation on its own terms, leaving it half 
the Territories, and that it is acknowledged by Eu- 
rope, and takes its place as an admitted member of 
the community of nations^ It will be desirable to 
take thought beforehand what are to be our own 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 



29 



future relations with a new Power, professing- the 
principles of Attila and Genghis Khan as the foun- 
dation of its Constitution. Are we to see with in- 
difference its victorious army let loose to propagate 
their national faith at the rifle's mouth throus^h 
Mexico and Central America? Shall we suhniit to 
see fire and sword carried over Cuba and Porto 
Rico, and Hayti and Liberia conquered and brt>ught 
back to slavery ] We shall soon have causes 
enough of quarrel on our own account. When we 
are in the act of sending an expedition against 
Mexico to redress the wrongs of private British 
subjects, we should do well to reflect in time that 
the President of the new Republic, Mr. Jefferson 
Davis, was the original inventor of repudiation. 
Mississippi was the first State which repudiated, 
Mr. Jefferson Davis was Governor of Mississippi, 
and the Legislature of Mississippi had passed a 
Bill recognizing and providing for the debt, which 
Bill Mr. Jefferson Davis vetoed. Unless we aban- 
don the principles we have for two generations con- 
sistently professed and acted on, we should be at 
w^ar with the new Confederacy within five years 
about the African slave-trade. An EnoHsh Gov- 
ernment will hardly be base enough to recognize 
them, unless they accept all the treaties by which 
America is at present bound ; nor, it may be hoped, 
even if de facto independent, would they be admit- 
ted to the courtesies of diplomatic intercourse, un- 
less they granted in the most explicit manner the 



30 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

riglit of search. To allow the slave-ships of a 
Confederation formed for the extension of slavery 
to come and go free, and unexamined, between 
America and the African coast, would be to re- 
nounce even the pretence of attempting to protect 
Africa against the man-stealer, and abandon that 
Continent to the horrors, on a far larger scale, 
which were practised before Granville Sharp and 
Clarkson were in existence. But even if the right 
of intercepting their slavers were acknowledged by 
treaty, which it never would be, the arrogance of 
the Southern slave-holders would not long submit to 
its exercise. Their pride and self-conceit, swelled 
to an inordinate height by their successful struggle, 
would defy the power of England as they had al- 
ready successfully defied that of their Northern 
countrymen. After our people by their cold disap- 
probation, and our press by its invective, had com- 
bined with their own difficulties to damp the spirit 
of the Free States, and drive them to submit and 
make peace, we should have to fight the Slave 
States ourselves at far greater disadvantages, when 
we shoukl no longer have the wearied and exhaust- 
ed North for an ally. The time might come when 
the barbarous and barbarizing Power, which we by 
our moral support had helped into existence, would 
require a general crusade of civilized Europe, to 
extinguish the mischief which it had allowed, and 
we had aided, to rise up in the midst of our civi- 
lization. 



THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. g\ 

For these reasons I cannot join with those who 
cry Peace, peace. I cannot wish that this war 
should not have heen engaged in by the North, or 
that being engaged in, it should be terminated on 
any conditions but such as would retain the whole 
of the Territories as free soil. I am not blind to 
the possibility that it may require a long war to 
lowTr the arrogance and tame the aggressive ambi- 
tion of the slave-owners, to the point of either re- 
turning to the Union, or consenting to remain out 
of it with their present limits. But war, in a good 
cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can 
suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest 
of things : the decayed and degraded state of moral 
and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing tvorth a 
war, is worse. When a people are used as mere 
human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting 
bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes 
of a master, such war degrades a people. A war 
to protect other human beings against tyrannical in- 
justice ; a war to give victory to their own ideas of 
right and good, and which is their own war, carried 
on for an Ijonest purpose by their free choice — is 
often the means of their regeneration. A man who 
has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing 
which he cares more about than he does about his 
personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no 
chance of being free, unless made and kept so by 
the exertions of better men than himself. As long 
as justice and injustice have not terminated tJiei)^ 



3£ THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 

ever renewing" fight for ascendancy in the affairs of 
mankind, human beings must be willing, when need 
is, to do battle for the one against the other. I am 
far from saying that the present struggle, on the 
part of the Northern Americans, is wholly of this 
exalted character ; that it has arrived at the stage 
of being altogether a war for justice, a war of prin- 
ciple. But there was from the beginning, and now 
is, a large infusion of that element in it ; and this 
is increasing, will increase, and if the war lasts, 
will in the end predominate. Should that time 
come, not only will the greatest enormity which still 
exists among mankind as an institution, receive far 
earlier its coup de grace than there has ever, until 
now, appeared any probability of; but in effecting 
this the Free States will have raised themselves to 
that elevated position in the scale of morality and 
dignity, which is derived from great sacrifices con- 
sciously made in a virtuous cause, and the sense of 
an inestimable benefit to all future ages, brought 
about by their own voluntary efforts. 



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